Automation - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 250

situationscanbetrackedandinvestigated.Oftenautomationisincompleteandcertainedge
casesrequiremanualintervention.Thosecasescanalsobetrackedandcategorized,andthe
more pervasive ones can be prioritized for automation.
Tool building is good, but automation is required for scalable cloud computing.
12.3 Goals of Automation
In cloud services, automation is a must, not a “nice to have”—it is required for growth.
Cloud-based systems grow in many ways: more machines, more subsystems and services,
and new operational responsibilities. If a new person had to be hired for each new service
orevery n newmachines,acloud-basedservicewouldnotbeabletofunction.Nocompany
could find enough new qualified SAs, nor could it afford to pay so many people. Consid-
ering that larger organizations are more difficult to manage, the people management chal-
lenge alone would be insurmountable.
There is a popular misconception that the goal of automation is to do tasks faster than
they could be done manually. That is just one of the goals. Other goals include the follow-
ing:
• Help scaling. Automation is a workforce multiplier. It permits one person to do the
work of many.
• Improve accuracy. Automation is less error prone than people are. Automation
does not get distracted or lose interest, nor does it get sloppy over time. Over time
software is improved to handle more edge cases and error situations. Unlike hard-
ware, software gets stronger over time ( Spolsky 2004 , p. 183).
• Increase repeatability. Software is more consistent than humans when doing
tasks. Consistency is part of a well-controlled environment.
• Improve reliability. Once a process is automated, it is easier to collect statistics
and metrics about the process. These data can then be used to identify problems
and improve reliability.
• Save time. There is never enough time to do all the work that needs to be done. An
automated task should require less SA time than a manual one.
• Make processes faster. Manual processes are slower because they involve think-
ing and typing. Both are error prone and correcting mistakes often has a large time
penalty itself.
• Enable more safeguards. Adding additional pre- and post-checks to an automated
process is easy. Doing so incurs a one-time cost, but improves the automation for
all future iterations of the process. Adding more checks to a manual process adds a
burden and creates temptation for the person to skip them.